“In his monumental study of the causes and the consequences of the Thirty Years War, Wilson challenges traditional interpretations of the war as primarily religious. “Wilson’s monumental study captures both the complexities of the political and military transformations and the level of brutality that the endemic struggles unleashed… This will be the defining study of the Thirty Years War for the next generation. “Only in retrospect did the strife acquire coherence as the Thirty Years’ War, and Wilson incisively cuts through its several phases to recount the objectives and options of the warring parties… Confidently argued, clearly written, Wilson’s history is superb coverage of this pivotal period in European history.

It is a fascinating, brilliantly written attempt to explain a compelling series of events, which tore the heart out of Europe. “Peter Wilson’s book is a major work, the first new history of the Thirty Years’ War in a generation. Sometimes, though, the very best of them have to be.

His scholarship seems to me remarkable, his prose light and lovely, his judgments fair. It is huge both in its scene-setting and its unfolding narrative detail… It is to Wilson’s credit that he can both offer the reader a detailed account of this terrible and complicated war and step back to give due summaries. It turns out that the quintessential war of religion was scarcely one at all… Wilson’s masterful account of the Thirty Years War is a reminder that war, and peace, are almost never the offspring of conviction alone. Wilson severely qualifies this conventional wisdom. Historians typically portray the Thirty Years War as the last and goriest of Europe’s religious wars-a final bonfire of the zealots before the cooler age of enlightened statecraft. It also offers a bracingly novel interpretation. The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy is a history of prodigious erudition that manages to corral the byzantine complexity of the Thirty Years War into a coherent narrative. “Among continental Europeans, the Thirty Years War is etched in memory… A definitive account has been needed, and now Peter Wilson, one of Britain’s leading historians of Germany, has provided it.

The thirty years war wilson